As a supplier, you're constantly looking for ways to reduce costs in the payment cycle. While many suppliers think that corporate cards result in higher costs to them, in reality, card acceptance can actually positively impact the bottom line through a combination of cost savings, reduced bad debts and increased revenue.

Analyst Insight: By 2025, issues such as globalization, social transparency, risk management and sustainability will bring new challenges to all the best procurement organizations around the world. For diverse suppliers, these changes will pose new challenges, while bringing new opportunities for those with a vision for the future. - Angie Li, Partner; Curtis Simpson, Manager; Kirsty A. McNally, Manager, all with Advisory Services of Ernst & Young LLP

Analyst Insight: Today's chief supply chain officer (CSCO) is beset by pressures on all fronts, struggling to understand and meet customer demands for cheaper, faster and efficient logistic processes from source to final delivery. Under omnichannel competitive pressures, web and mobile orders tendered by 2 p.m. must be fulfilled and shipped in the same. These growing B2C fulfill-to-deliver flows add shipping and labor costs and, if not optimized, impact margins and profitability. This constitutes a call to action! - Bob Heaney, Research Director and Principal Analyst, Aberdeen Group

Reversing years of steadily increasing prices, the cost of beef is expected to decrease between 10 percent and 17 percent across all primal cuts in 2016 in what amounts to "the biggest story of the year" for chain restaurant operators, said DeWayne Dove, vice president of risk management for supply chain management firm SpenDifference.

Food manufacturers across the globe have admitted failing to put in place basic safeguards to protect vulnerable workers in their supply chains - almost one year on from laws to stop slavery, child labor and unethical working practices.

It is the human rights abuse that everybody likes to maintain is not happening. But within corporate supply chains across the developing world – from the cocoa-growing lands of the Ivory Coast to the seafood sector of Thailand – human trafficking and modern day slavery is still commonplace, with people being made to work and live in appalling conditions with little or no pay.

Low profitability has undermined commodity producers and brings high risks to the supply chain, according to IHS Inc.

Innovation of the Year: Automating the assembly of pallets that incorporate cases of multiple dimensions leads to big savings in labor costs, a safer work environment, a streamlined D.C. operation, and better service to retail outlets. Innovator of the Year: The Liquor Control Board of Ontario; Runner-Up: Lennox Residential; Finalists: Hewlett-Packard, U.S. Marine Corps, Shared Support Services of Southeastern Ontario